THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

DAVIS 


/Lu*w 


v 


THE 

LIFE,    CHARACTER   AND   WRITINGS 
OF 

WILLIAM    CULLEN    BRYANT. 


THE 


LIFE,    CHARACTER   AND   WRITINGS 


OF 


WILLIAM  CULLEN  BRYANT. 


A     COMMEMORATIVE     ADDRESS 

DELIVERED    BEFORE   THE 

NEW    YORK     HISTORICAL    SOCIETY 

AT  THE  ACADEMY  OF  Music,  DECEMBER  30,  1878. 


GEORGE   WILLIAM    CURTIS. 


NEW    YORK  : 
CHARLES     SCRIBNER'S     SONS, 

743  AND  745  BROADWAY. 

LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
DAVIS 


COPYRIGHT,  1879,  BY 
THE   NEW   YORK   HISTORICAL   SOCIETY. 


WILLIAM  CULLEN  BRYANT. 


THIS  great  and  distinguished  assembly  is 
in  itself  an  imposing  tribute  to  the  memory  of 
an  illustrious  man.  But  even  more  impressive 
than  this  presence  of  genius  and  distinction, 
of  character  and  intelligence,  is  the  absence 
of  one  citizen — that  venerable  figure  which 
had  come  to  represent  in  this  community  all 
the  civic  graces  and  virtues,  and  from  whose 
temperate  lips  on  every  occasion  of  literary 
and  patriotic  commemoration,  of  political 
emergency  or  of  public  appeal,  we  have  been 
accustomed  to  hear  the  fitting  words  of  coun 
sel,  of  encouragement,  of  consolation.  When 
Cooper  died,  the  restless  city  paused  to  hear 
Bryant's  words  of  praise  and  friendship. 
When  Irving  followed  Cooper,  all  hearts 
turned  to  Bryant,  and  it  was  before  this  so 
ciety  and  in  this  place  that  he  told  the  story 


8  A  Commemorative  Address. 

of  Irving's  life.  Now  Bryant  has  followed 
Cooper  and  Irving,  the  last  of  that  early 
triumvirate  of  American  literature,  not  less 
renowned  than  the  great  triumvirate  of  Amer 
ican  politics,  and  he  whose  life  began  before 
the  century  leaves  behind  but  one  of  his 
early  literary  contemporaries.  The  vener 
able  poet  Dana,  friend  of  Bryant's  youth,  at 
an  age  prolonged  beyond  fourscore  and  ten— 

"  An  old  age,  serene  and  bright, 
And  lovely  as  a  Lapland  night " — 

the  editor  who  published  Thanatopsis  sixty- 
one  years  ago,  has  seen  its  author  join  the 
innumerable  caravan  and  lie  down  to  pleasant 
dreams.  But  a  thousand  eloquent  and  rev 
erent  voices  of  the  press  and  the  pulpit,  of 
the  college  and  the  club,  of  orator  and  poet, 
from  the  sea-coast  to  the  prairies,  have 
spoken  for  him  who  spoke  for  all.  There 
was  no  eminent  American  upon  whom  the 
judgment  of  his  countrymen  would  be  more 
immediate  and  unanimous.  The  broad  and 
simple  outline  of  his  character  and  career  had 
become  universally  familiar  like  a  mountain 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  9 

or  the  sea,  and  in  speaking  of  him  I  but  re 
peat  the  thought  of  every  American,  and 
register  a  judgment  already  pronounced.  A 
patriarch  of  our  literature,  and  in  a  perma 
nent  sense  the  oldest  of  our  poets,  a  scholar 
familiar  with  many  languages  and  literatures, 
finely  sensitive  to  the  influence  of  nature, 
and  familiar  with  trees  and  birds  and  flowers, 
he  was  especially  fitted,  it  might  be  thought, 
for  scholarly  seclusion  and  the  delights  of  the 
strict  literary  life.  But  he  who  melodiously 
marked  the  solitary  way  of  the  water-fowl 
through  the  rosy  depth  of  the  glowing  heav 
en,  and  on  the  lonely  New  England  hills, 

"  Rock-ribbed  and  ancient  as  the  sun," 

saw  in  the  river  and  valley,  in  forest  and 
ocean,  only  the  solemn  decoration  of  man's 
tomb-^-the  serious,  musing  country-boy  felt 
also  the  magic  of  human  sympathy,  the  im 
pulse  of  his  country,  the  political  genius  of  his 
race,  and  the  poet  became  distinctively  an 
American  and  a  public  political  leader.  In 
the  active  American  life  of  this  century  he 
bore  his  full  part,  never  quailing,  never  doubt- 


io  A  Commemorative  Address. 

ing,  giving  and  taking  blows  ;  stern  often,  re 
served,  unsparing,  but  panoplied  ever  in  an 
armor  which  no  fabled  Homeric  hero  wore, 
beyond  the  art  of  Vulcan  to  forge  or  the  dark 
waters  of  the  Styx  to  charm,  the  impenetrable 
armor  of  moral  principle.  Time  as  it  passed 
chastened  the  ardor  of  the  partisan,  without 
relaxing  the  vital  interest  of  the  citizen  in  pub 
lic  affairs.  His  lofty  personality  rose  above 
the  clamor  of  selfish  ambition,  and  in  his  life 
he  reconciled,  both  in  fact  and  to  the  popular 
imagination,  the  seeming  incompatibility  of 
literary  taste  and  accomplishment,  and  supe 
riority  with  constant  political  activity.  So 
rises  the  shining  dome  of  Mont  Blanc  above 
the  clustering  forests  and  the  roaring  streams, 
and  on  its  towering  sides  the  growths  of  vari 
ous  climates  and  of  different  zones,  in  due 
order,  meet  and  mingle.  It  is  by  no  official 
title,  by  no  mere  literary  fame,  by  no  signal 
or  single  service  or  work ;  no  marvelous  Lear 
or  Transfiguration,  no  stroke  of  state  craft 
calling  to  political  life  a  new  world  to  redress 
the  balance  of  the  old,  no  resounding  Auster- 
litz  or  triumphant  Trafalgar,  that  Bryant  is 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  1 1 

commemorated.  There  may  have  been,  in 
his  long  life-time,  genius  more  affluent  and 
creativ-e,  greater  renown,  abilities  more  com 
manding,  careers  more  dazzling  and  romantic ; 
but  no  man,  no  American,  living  or  dead,  has 
more  truly  and  amply  illustrated  the  scope  '"' 
and  the  fidelity  of  Republican  citizenship. 

Something  of  this  is  explained  by  the  time 
and  place  of  his  birth,  and  the  influences  that 
moulded  his  childhood.  At  the  close  of  the 
last  century,  his  father,  Peter  Bryant,  a  phy 
sician,  and  the  son  of  a  physician,  followed 
the  family  of  his  future  wife  from  Bridgewater, 
in  Massachusetts,  westward  across  the  Con 
necticut  river,  and  up  into  the  Hampshire  hills 
to  Cummington,  where  the  first  pioneer  had 
built  his  cabin  scarcely  thirty  years  before, 
and  there,  in  1794,  Bryant  was  born.  West 
ern  Massachusetts  is  a  high  hill  country,  with 
secluded  green  valleys — a  farming  and  graz 
ing  region,  but  every  little  stream  turns  a 
mill,  and  along  the  water-courses  the  air  hums 
with  the  music  of  a  various  industry.  The 
great  hills  are  still  largely  covered  with 
woods  that  shelter  the  solitary  pastures  and 


12  A  Commemorative  Address. 

upland  farms ;  woods  beautiful  in  spring"  with 
the  white  laurel  and  azalea,  ringing  through 
the  short  summer  with  the  song  of  the  hermit 
thrush  and  the  full-choired  music  of  New 
England  birds,  and  in  autumn  blazing  with 
scarlet  and  gold  of  the  changing  leaf,  until  the 
cold  splendor  of  the  snowy  winter  closes  the 
year. 

All  trace  of  the  house  in  which  Bryant  was 
born  is  gone  ;  but  the  broad  landscape  that 
the  boy  saw  remains,  softened  now  by  tillage 
and  orchards,  but  a  grave,  solitary  landscape 
still.  The  region  was  soon  familiar  to  him. 
Not  only  its  serious  spirit  touched  his  soul 
and  left  its  inextinguishable  impress  upon  his 
character — but  he  knew  it  in  detail — its  trees, 
its  shrubs  and  plants,  their  history  and  uses — 
the  habits  and  resorts  of  all  its  birds  and 
beasts  ;  and  this  knowledge  gave  the  man  the 
accuracy  of  a  naturalist.  The  very  spirit  of 
primitive  New  England  brooded  over  the 
thinly  peopled  hills,  and  in  the  little  villages 
and  farms,  and  in  the  bare  meeting-house  and 
log  school-house  were  cherished  and  perpetu 
ated  the  Puritan  traditions  and  character  that 


William  Ciillen  Bryant.  13 

have  made  a  great  people.  In  the  more  se 
cluded  communities  of  that  region  the  simple 
and  robust  virtues  of  a  vanished  century  still 
linger,  and  we  may  see  in  them  to-day  what 
our  fathers  beheld,  and,  beholding,  joyfully 
believed  a  republic  possible — a  republic  of 
honest,  equal,  intelligent,  self-respecting  citi 
zens,  the  republic  of  Franklin  and  of  Adams, 
the  republic  of  Lincoln  and  of  Bryant.  He 
was  not  born  too  late  to  see  and  feel  among 
the  people  of  the  hills  the  spirit  of  the  Revo 
lution — to  hear,  by  the  blazing  winter  fire,  tales 
which  are  now  romantic  legends,  told  by 
their  own  heroes,  stories  of  Bennington  and 
Bunker  Hill,  of  Ticonderoga  and  Saratoga  ; 
and  doubtless,  also,  he  had  himself  seen  some 
of  the  Hampshire  recruits  of  Shay's  rebellion, 
which  sprang  from  the  confusion  and  suffering 
that  followed  the  Revolution.  There  were 
remoter  and  more  terrible  traditions,  also, 
tales  of  the  old  French  war,  of  Port  Royal 
and  Louisburg ;  legends  of  the  beautiful  val 
ley  of  the  Connecticut,  which  King  Philip's 
war  had  wasted  ;  cruel  memories  of  Deerfield, 
and  Hadley,  and  Turner's  Falls,  and  of  the 


14  A  Commemorative  Address. 

fatally  luxuriant  meadow  where  the  flower  of 
Essex  lay  bleeding. 

Bryant  has  described  the  sports  of  his  boy 
hood  and  the  customs  of  the  country-side. 
They  are  not  all  gone.  The  columns  of 
smoke  rising  over  the  woods  from  the  maple- 
sugar  camp,  in  the  chill  air  of  March  and  early 
April,  eighty  years  ago,  still  hang  above 
them ;  and  when,  under  the  reddening  trees 
of  the  last  October,  I  went  to  the  grave  of  his 
father  in  the  lonely  burial-ground  on  the  hill, 
the  farmer  was  piling  upon  the  barn  floor  the 
long,  rustling  heaps  of  corn  for  the  husking, 
as  the  boy  Bryant  saw  them.  His  books 
were  Sanford  and  Merton,  and  Miss  Barbauld, 
the  Pilgrim's  Progress  and  Robinson  Crusoe, 
and  Berquin's  Stories  and  Watts's  Hymns. 
But  the  father  early  trained  his  son  in  the 
books  that  he  himself  liked  to  read — Pope, 
and  Gray,  and  Goldsmith — and  his  son  soon 
began  to  echo  their  music.  The  boy  wrote 
verses  at  ten  which  the  happy  father  sent  to 
the  "  Hampshire  Gazette,"  at  Northampton, 
a  paper  which  had  been  established  with  true 
American  instinct,  in  the  midst  of  the  excite- 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  15 

ment  of  Shay's  rebellion,  to  encourage  loyalty 
to  law.  It  was  a  fitting  journal  in  which  to 
print  the  earliest  verses  of  the  future  editor 
who  was  always  to  defend  law  as  the  palla 
dium  of  liberty. 

To  this  secluded  mountain  village,  and  to 
the  boy  and  his  father,  who  had  evidently  a 
singular  sympathy  even  at  that  age,  the  news 
of  the  great  world  came  by  the  weekly  post. 
There  were  then  printed  during  the  week,  in 
all  New  England,  only  thirty  thousand  copies 
of  newspapers,  and  among  them  there  was 
but  one  daily  paper.  But  the  whole  country 
glowed  with  political  ardor.  The  River 
Gods,  as  the  heads  of  leading  families  in  the 
valley  of  the  Connecticut  were  called,  were 
uncompromising  Federalists,  and  so  were  the 
social  powers  of  the  hills.  The  Federal  Doc 
tor  Bryant  trained  his  son  in  his  own  political 
views,  and,  doubtless,  he  thought  to  good 
purpose,  when,  before  his  fourteenth  birthday, 
the  son  had  written  "  The  Embargo,"  a  poem 
which  reflected,  in  Pope's  decasyllabic,  the 
universal  Federal  hatred  of  Thomas  Jeffer 
son.  Percival,  also,  who  was  but  ten  months 


1 6  A  Commemorative  Address. 

younger  than  Bryant,  displayed  at  the  same 
age  of  thirteen  the  fervor  of  Connecticut  Fed 
eralism  in  his  "  Commerciad,"  a  poem  of  two 
thousand  two  hundred  and  sixty-eight  lines, 
which  probably  nobody  ever  read  through,  in 
which  he  was  as  unsparing  upon  Mr.  Jeffer 
son  as  the  young  Bryant,  but  somewhat  less 
smooth  in  versification  : 

"  There  Hillhouse,  born  our  country's  rights  to  guard, 
To  keep  our  people  from  the  statutes  hard 
Of  cursed  Jefferson,  son  of  the  Devil, 
Whose  thoughts  are  wicked,  and  whose  mind  is  evil." 

Such  rhymes  of  boys  are  but  songs  of  the 
mocking-bird ;  yet  they  show  the  intensity 
and  bitterness  of  the  political  feeling  amid 
which  Bryant  was  trained,  at  a  time  which 
we  sometimes  fondly  call  the  golden  age  of 
the  Republic.  But  a  time  in  which  boys  were 
taught  to  call  Jefferson  the  Devil,  and  in 
which  it  was  said  of  Washington  that  he  was 
the  source  of  all  the  misfortunes  of  the  coun 
try,  was  a  time  whose  frantic  political  vituper 
ation  pales  the  "  uneffectual  fire  "  of  our  own, 
and  in  whose  mad  extravagance  we  may  well 
study  the  baseness  of  partisan  ribaldry. 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  17 

Bryant  learned  Latin  and  Greek  readily, 
and  he  was  sixteen  years  old  when,  in  Octo 
ber,  1810,  he  joined  the  Sophomore  Class  at 
Williams  College.  One  of  his  classmates, 
General  Charles  F.  Sedgwick,  still  living  in 
an  honored  age,  describes  the  wiry  and  well- 
knit  figure  of  the  young  poet,  the  beauty  of 
his  face,  and  his  full  flowing,  dark  brown  hair 
when  he  came  to  the  college.  The  reputa 
tion  of  his  early  verses  and  the  rumor  of  his 
genius  were  like  an  aureole  about  the  head 
of  the  modest  young  scholar;  but  he  was 
never  known  to  speak  of  his  verses,  nor  did 
his  companions  allude  to  them.  One  day, 
however,  to  the  delight  of  the  class  and  of 
the  tutor,  he  recited  an  original  poem,  and  to 
a  few  friends  he  read  a  translation  of  an  ode 
of  Anacreon.  During  his  brief  college  life 
Bryant  was  mild  and  gentlemanly,  unobtrusive 
in  his  conduct,  grave  in  conversation,  diligent 
in  study,  associating  naturally  with  the  quiet 
and  orderly  students.  But  he  was  not  con 
tented.  The  boy  had  come  down  from  the 
pure  breezes  of  the  hills  into  what  seemed  to 
him  the  closer  and  less  healthful  air  of  the 


1 8  A  Commemorative  Address. 

little  village,  not  then  as  now  one  of  the  love 
liest  of  the  beautiful  villages  of  New  England, 
and  at  the  end  of  his  second  term,  the  ist  of 
May,  1811,  having  been  at  college  only  seven 
months,  he  took  an  honorable  dismission. 
The  College,  however,  subsequently  granted 
him  his  degree,  and  restored  his  name  to  the 
catalogue.  Before  Bryant  left,  he  read  before 
a  college  society  a  short  humorously  sarcastic 
poem  upon  his  alma  mater,  a  boyish  freak  at 
which  he  always  smiled.  The  harmless  verse 
survives,  I  believe,  only  in  the  recollection  of 
the  Reverend  Dr.  Hallock,  son  of  the  Plain- 
field  pastor  who  fitted  Bryant  for  college. 
But  Dr.  Hallock,  with  delicate  fidelity  to  the 
fame  of  his  college  and  his  friend,  has  locked 
it  fast  in  his  memory  and  jealously  guards  the 
key.  Upon  leaving  Williams,  Bryant  had 
hoped  to  go  with  his  chum  to  Yale  College, 
but  his  father  found  that  the  cost  would  be 
too  great,  so  the  youth  returned  to  his  father's 
house  and  devoted  himself  for  a  year  to  the 
classics  and  mathematics. 

This  was  the  end   of  Bryant's   schooling, 
and  this  was  all  the  visible  preparation  for  the 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  19 

writing  of  the  first  enduring  poem  in  Amer 
ican  literature — the  work,  indeed,  from  which 
that  literature  distinctively  dates — the  poem 
which,  in  all  the  after,  riper  fruitage  of  the 
poet's  genius,  was  never  surpassed.  The 
marvel  of  Thanatopsis  is  the  greater,  because, 
although  a  singularly  mature  and  precocious 
boy,  there  is  no  sign  in  Bryant's  earlier  verses, 
flowing  and  correct  as  they  are,  of  original 
power.  In  Raphael's  early  pictures  there  is 
evidently  the  overmastering  influence  of  Peru- 
gino,  but  there  is  also  a  finer  and  humaner 
touch.  In  Beethoven's  first  music  there  is 
often  the  rhythmical  reminiscence  of  Mozart, 
but  there  are  also  signs  of  the  power  and 
grandeur  which  we  know  by  the  master's 
name.  But  in  the  earlier  verses  of  Bryant,  as 
in  Byron's  Hours  of  Idleness,  there  is  no  pre 
sage  of  his  genius,  no  prelude  of  his  fame. 

Bryant  says  that  Thanatopsis  was  written 
soon  after  leaving  college.  He  was  not  sure 
whether  it  was  in  his  eighteenth  or  nineteenth 
year,  but  it  was  before  he  began  the  study  of 
the  law  in  1813.  For  some  reason  he  did 
not  send  it  to  the  ((  Hampshire  Gazette,"  nor 


2O  A  Commemorative  Address. 

seek  a  publication  in  any  form.  But  once, 
upon  leaving  home,  he  placed  the  MS.  of 
Thanatopsis,  with  that  of  other  verses,  in  a 
drawer  in  his  father's  office.  It  must  have 
lain  there  for  some  months  when  Dr.  Bryant, 
then  a  member  of  the  Legislature,  finding  the 
poems  in  his  drawer,  sent  them,  anonymously, 
and  without  his  son's  knowledge,  to  the 
"  North  American  Review,"  which  had  then 
been  published  for  two  years,  and  was  at  once 
a  review  and  a  magazine.  Mr.  Dana,  who 
was  one  of  the  editors,  immediately  recog 
nized  the  worth  of  the  poem,  and  said  truly, 
what  no  man  was  more  qualified  than  he  to 
declare,  that  it  could  not  have  been  written  in 
this  country,  for  he  knew  no  American  who 
could  write  it.  He  was  told  that  the  author 
was  a  member  of  the  Legislature,  and  he  has 
tened  to  the  Senate  Chamber,  where  Dr.  Bry 
ant  was  pointed  out  to  him.  "  'Tis  a  good 
head,"  he  said,  "  but  I  do  not  see  Thanatop 
sis  there."  The  poem  was  published  in  the 
September  number  of  the  Review  in  1817, 
and  it  is  preceded  by  a  separate  poem  of  four 
stanzas,  which  was  attached  to  it  by  mistake. 


William  C^tllen  Bryant.  21 

Their  tone  is  that  of  the  jame  melancholy  fas 
cination  with  death,  but  they  are  in  a  wholly 
different  key.  Thanatopsis  itself,  as  originally 
printed,  contained  but  forty-nine  of  the  eighty- 
one  lines  that  we  know,  and  it  was  accom 
panied  by  three  of  the  MSS.  which  the  Doc 
tor  had  found  in  his  office  drawer:  the 
Inscription  for  the  Entrance  to  a  Wood,  and 
two  translations  from  Horace. 

This  is  all  that  we  know  of  the  production 
"of  this  poem.  I  linger  upon  it,  because  it 
was  the  first  adequate  poetic  voice  of  the 
solemn  New  England  spirit;  and  in  the  gran 
deur  of  the  hills,  in  the  heroic  Puritan  tra 
dition  of  sacrifice  and  endurance,  in  the 
daily  life,  saddened  by  imperious  and  awful 
theologic  dogma,  in  the  hard  circumstance  of 
the  pioneer  household,  the  contest  with  the 
wilderness,  the  grim  legends  of  Indians  and 
the  war,  have  we  not  some  outward  clue  to 
the  strain  of  Thanatopsis,  the  depthless  and 
entrancing  sadness,  as  of  inexorable  fate,  that 
murmurs,  like  the  autumn  wind  through  the  for 
est,  in  the  melancholy  cadences  of  this  hymn  to 
Death?  Moreover  it  was  without  a  harbinger 


22  A  Commemorative  Address. 

in  our  literature,  and  without  a  trace  of  the 
English  masters  of  the  hour.  The  contrast  in 
literary  splendor,  of  Europe  and  America  at 
the  beginning  of  the  century,  seemed  to  many 
a  sensitive  American  as  hopeless  as  it  was 
conspicuous.  The  great  German  epoch  of 
Goethe  and  Schiller  was  at  its  highest  glory, 
and  in  England,  Wordsworth,  Coleridge, 
Southey,  Shelley,  Keats,  Campbell,  Moore, 
and  Byron  were  in  full  song  when  Thanatop- 
sis  was  published.  The  contrast  was,  indeed,* 
hard.  In  vain  the  patriotic  President  Dwight 
had  said  that  Trumbull's  MacFingal  was  as 
good  as  Hudibras,  for  who  would  speak  for 
President  Dwight,  and  what  courage  was 
equal  to  saying  that  his  Conquest  of  Canaan 
was  as  good  as  Milton's  Paradise  Lost  ?  Yet 
Trumbull  and  Dwight,  Barlow  and  Freneau, 
were  our  chief  names  in  poetry,  and  Barlow's 
burlesque,  Hasty  Pudding,  was  the  best  char 
acteristic  American  poem  when  Thanatopsis 
appeared.  "Shall  we  match  Joel  Barlow," 
exclaimed  Fisher  Ames  a  little  earlier, 
"against  Homer  and  Hesiod?  Can  Thomas 
Paine  contend  against  Plato,  or  could  Find- 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  23 

lay's  history  of  his  own  (whisky)  insurrection 
vie  with  Sallust's  narrative  of  Catiline's?" 
We  are  apt  to  say  that  the  conditions  of  co 
lonial  settlement  are  not  favorable  to  literary 
and  artistic  development.  But  it  is  easy  to 
overestimate  the  value  of  mere  circumstance, 
and  it  is  always  the  genius,  not  the  circum 
stance,  that  controls.  Canova  used  to  say, 
that  if  Pitt  and  Fox  had  lived  in  Italy  they 
would  have  been  artists ;  but  we  must  not 
therefore  conclude  that  Eli  Whitney  was 
Dante  under  new  conditions,  and  that  if  Da 
vid  Crockett  had  been  born  in  Augustan 
Rome,  he  would  probably  have  come  down 
to  us  as  the  poet  Virgil.  Great  histories  will 
hardly  be  written  upon  the  frontier  of  a  new 
country  :  but  Robert  Burns,  in  a  hovel,  sang 
songs  as  pure  as  the  dew-drop  and  sweet  as 
the  morning.  It  is  precisely  the  intellectual 
force  and  independence,  the  nameless  and 
mysterious  genius  shown  in  Thanatopsis,  a 
poem  so  purely  original  and  unexpected,  that 
Dana  at  once  said  that  it  could  not  have  been 
written  by  an  American,  which  is  the  pioneer 
of  national  literature,  and  which  placed  the 


24  A  Commemorative  Address. 

poem  at  once  and  forever  in  the  literature  of 
the  world. 

When  Thanatopsis  was  published,  Bryant 
was  already  a  practicing  lawyer.  He  had  be 
gun  his  studies  with  Judge  Samuel  Howe,  of 
Worthington,  near  Cummington,  who,  when 
he  found  a  volume  of  Wordsworth  in  his  stu 
dent's  hands,  warned  him  that  such  reading 
would  spoil  his  style,  and  he  was  admitted  to 
the  bar  at  Plymouth  in  1815.  He  opened  an 
office  for  a  year  in  Plainfield,  where  he  had 
fitted  for  college ;  but  few  clients  came,  and  in 
1816,  in  the  month  of  October,  he  says,  when 
the  woods  were  in  all  the  glory  of  autumn,  he 
turned  his  back  upon  the  Hampshire  hills  for 
the  adjoining  county  of  Berkshire,  and  settled 
in  Great  Barrington.  In  Berkshire  he  passed 
nine  years,  and  there  some  of  his  most  fami 
liar  verses  were  written.  A  companion  of 
those  days,  the  venerable  Ralph  Taylor,  who 
lived  in  the  same  house  with  him,  remembers 
that  he  was  fond  of  roaming  over  the  hills, 
and  in  his  walks  was  very  genial  and  sociable. 
He  had  gay  comrades,  too,  village  revelers  ; 
but  Bryant,  then  as  always,  quietly  held  his 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  25 

own  temperate  way,  unseduced  by  fatal  good- 
fellowship.  He  was  an  active,  learned,  and, 
as  I  have  heard,  even  a  fiery  young  lawyer, 
and  his  name  appears  four  or  five  times  in  the 
reports  of  the  Supreme  Court  He  was  also 
a  true  son  of  the  land  of  the  town-meeting, 
and  he  did  not  evade  his  duty  as  a  citizen. 
On  the  ist  day  of  January,  1818,  he  delivered 
an  address  before  the  Great  Barrington  Bible 
Society,  and  in  1820  he  was  elected  clerk  of 
the  town,  and  remained  in  office  until  he  re 
moved  to  New  York.  As  a  Justice  of  the 
Peace  his  first  act  was  the  marriage  of  a  gen 
tleman  still  living,  and  as  town-clerk,  in  Jan 
uary,  1821,  he  recorded  in  the  town  book  his 
own  marriage — that  marriage  to  which  the 
sacred  and  hidden  allusions  in  his  verse  are 
exquisitely  touching  and  tender,  and  which 
was  the  most  gracious  and  beautiful  influence 
of  his  life.  For  the  forty-five  years  that  they 
lived  together  his  wife  was  his  only  really  in 
timate  friend,  and  when  she  died  he  had  no 
other.  He  was  young,  his  fame  was  growing, 
and  with  domestic  duties,  with  literary  studies 
and  work,  and  professional  and  public  activi- 


26  A  Commemorative  Address. 

ties,  his   tranquil  days  passed  in   the  happy 
valley  of  the  Housatonic. 

It  is  plain,  however,  that  Bryant's  taste,  his 
temperament,  his  natural  powers,  were  averse 
to  the  law.  The  literary  instinct  was  always 
stirring  in  his  heart,  and  there  are  constant 
and  delightful  traces  of  his  literary  industry 
at  this  time.  In  March,  1818,  he  published 
in  the  "  North  American  Review"  a  fragment 
of  Simonides,  the  Lines  to  a  Water-fowl,  and 
a  poem  to  a  friend  upon  his  marriage,  in 
which  the  poet  gayly  declares  what  he  daily 
disproved  : 

"  And  I  that  loved  to  trace  the  woods  before, 
And  climb  the  hill,  a  playmate  to  the  breeze, 
Have  vowed  to  tune  the  rural  lay  no  more, 
Have  bid  my  useless  classics  sleep  at  ease, 
And    left    the    race    of  bards    to    scribble,   starve   and 
freeze." 

If  he  thought  himself  willing  to  leave  the 
muse,  she  was  not  ready  to  desert  him.  In 
the  next  July  he  contributed  to  the  "  Re 
view  "  an  interesting  paper  upon  American 
poetry,  in  which  he  finds  little  to  praise,  but 
thinks  that  it  was  better  than  could  have 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  27 

been  expected  in  a  young  nation  just  begin 
ning  to  attend  to  intellectual  refinement,  and 
he  concludes  felicitously,  but  discouragingly, 
that  the  only  poets  we  had  could  hardly  be 
more  admired  "  without  danger  to  the  taste 
of  the  nation."  A  year 'later,  in  June,  1819, 
he  published  a  short  essay  in  the  "  North 
American  Review,"  on  "  The  Happy  Tem 
perament,"  which  is  singularly  interesting  as 
the  work  of  a  poet  whose  strain  is  sometimes 
called  remote  from  human  sympathy,  and  a 
man  who  was  so  often  thought  to  be  cold 
and  austere.  It  is  not,  says  the  author  of 
Thanatopsis,  the  shallow,  unsympathetic  dis 
position  which  laughs  all  ills  away  that  is  to 
be  called  happy,  because  the  "  melancholy 
feelings,  when  called  up  by  their  proper  and 
natural  causes,  and  confined  to  their  proper 
limits,  are  the  parents  of  almost  all  our  vir 
tues."  "  The  temperament  of  an  unbroken 
cheerfulness,"  says  our  poet,  "  is  the  tempera 
ment  of  insensibility."  A  paper  in  the  Sep 
tember  number  of  the  same  year,  on  Tri 
syllabic  Feet,  in  Iambic  verse,  shows  his 
constant  and  careful  study  of  the  literary  art, 


28  A  Commemorative  Address. 

as  well  as  of  literature.  In  the  summer  of 
1821,  the  author  whose  genius  had  been  first 
recognized  by  the  literary  tribunal  of  Cam 
bridge,  read  before  the  Phi  Beta  Kappa  So 
ciety,  at  Harvard  College,  his  longest  poem, 
"  The  Ages."  It  is  a  simple,  serious,  and 
thoughtful  survey  of  history,  tracing  a  gen 
eral  law  of  progress  ;  and  the  stately  Spen 
serian  measure  is  marked  by  the  moderation, 
the  sinewy  simplicity,  the  maturity  and  free 
dom  from  mannerism,  which  are  Bryant's 
sign-manual.  The  last  stanza  of  this  poem 
breathes  in  majestic  music  that  pure  passion 
for  America,  and  that  strong  and  sublime 
faith  in  her  destiny,  which  constantly  appears 
in  his  verse  and  never  wavered  in  his  heart. 
It  was  the  era  of  the  Holy  Alliance  in  Eu 
rope,  the  culmination  of  the  reaction  against 
the  French  Revolution  and  the  Napoleonic 
wars,  when  popular  liberty  was  in  mortal 
peril;  and,  after  a  glance  at  struggling  Eu 
rope,  the  poet  exclaims : 

"  But  them,  my  country  !  thou  shalt  never  fall, 
But  with  thy  children — thy  maternal  care, 
Thy  lavish  love,  thy  blessings  showered  on  all — 
These  are  thy  fetters— seas  and  stormy  air, 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  29 

Are  the  wide  barrier  of  thy  borders,  where, 
Among  thy  gallant  sons  that  guard  thee  well, 
Thou  laugh' st  at  enemies  !  who  shall  then  declare 
The  date  of  thy  deep-founded  strength,  or  tell 
How  happy  in  thy  lap  the  sons  of  men  shall  dwell  ?  " 

He  was  already  acknowledged  to  be  the 
first  of  our  poets,  and  he  himself  dates  the 
dawn  of  our  literature  in  the  year  1821,  the 
year  of  his  marriage  and  of  his  Harvard 
poem.  It  was  in  that  year  that  Cooper's 
Spy  was  published  and  Irving's  Sketch-Book 
was  completed,  and  Bryant's  own  first  slight 
volume  was  issued ;  Dana's  Idle  Man  was 
just  finished,  and  Miss  Sedgwick  had  already 
published  Hope  Leslie.  Two  years  before, 
Percival's  first  volume  had  appeared,  which 
Edward  Everett  had  saluted  as  a  harbinger 
of  great  achievements ;  and  Halleck's  and 
Drake's  Croakers  were  already  popular.  Bry 
ant's  ambition,  his  hopes,  his  conscious  pow 
er,  secretly  solicited  him  and  weaned  him 
more  and  more  from  the  law.  The  rigor  of 
his  Federalism  also  was  relaxing.  During  the 
earlier  days  of  his  life,  in  Berkshire,  his  name 
appears  officially  signed  to  notices  and  re- 


3O  A  Commemorative  Address. 

ports  of  Federal  meetings  and  caucuses,  but 
he  was  not  known  to  make  political  speeches, 
nor  to  be  an  active  politician.  All  signs,  even 
of  such  political  interest,  however,  disappear 
toward  the  end  of  his  residence  in  Great  Bar- 
rington,  although  he  undoubtedly  voted,  in 
1824,  for  John  Quincy  Adams,  as  there  was 
but  one  vote  cast  against  him  in  the  town. 

For  some  time  Bryant  had  counted  among 
his  most  faithful  friends  the  Sedgwicks  of 
Stockbridge,  one  of  the  most  noted  of  the 
Berkshire  families.  In  1820,  Miss  Sedgwick 
wrote  from  Stockbridge  that  she  had  sent  for 
Bryant,  and  he  had  called  upon  her  as  he 
came  from  court.  She  found  him  of  a  charm 
ing  countenance  ;  very  modest,  but  not  bash 
ful,  and  he  very  readily  promised  to  write 
some  hymns  for  her  friend,  Mr.  Sewall.  Two 
years  later  she  writes  from  New  York  that 
Bryant  had  been  in  town,  and  that  she  had 
never  seen  him  so  happy  nor  half  so  agree 
able.  She  describes  him  as  very  much  ani 
mated  with  his  prospects,  meaning  evidently 
his  literary  prospects,  and  full  of  good  sense, 
good  judgment,  and  moderation.  Miss  Sedg- 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  31 

wick's  brother,  Henry,  was  Bryant's  especial 
friend,  and  Mr.  Sedgwick's  hereditary  Feder 
alism  was  overborne  by  his  profound  interest 
in  the  question  of  free  trade.  He  wrote  ar 
ticles,  pamphlets,  and  essays  against  Mr. 
Clay's  American  and  tariff  system,  and  his 
arguments  found  a  prompt  and  ready  re 
sponse  in  Bryant's  instinctive  love  of  liberty. 
Perhaps,  as  his  friend  eloquently  talked,  the 
young  poet  recalled  the  lines  of  Pope  in 
"  Windsor  Forest,"  lines  that  he  must  often 
have  read  with  his  father,  and  often  after 
ward  in  fancy  applied  to  the  noble  bay  and 
harbor  of  this  great  city : 

"  The  time  shall  come,  when,  free  as  seas  or  wind, 
Unbounded  Thames  shall  flow  for  all  mankind ; 
Whole  nations  enter  with  each  swelling  tide, 
And  seas  but  join  the  regions  they  divide  ; 
Earth's  distant  ends  our  glory  shall  behold, 
And  the  New  World  launch  forth  to  seek  the  Old." 

Mr.  Sedgwick,  wishing  to  see  Bryant  in 
a  larger  sphere,  urged  him  constantly  to  re 
move  to  New  York,  and  Bryant's  heart  took 
sides  with  his  friend.  He  came  to  see  the 
citf ,  and  a  very  little  event  soon  broke  the 


32  A  Commemorative  Address. 

slight  thread  that  held  him  to  the  law.  The 
tradition  of  the  local  bar  is,  that  in  1824  Bry 
ant  had  obtained  for  a  client  a  verdict  for 
slander ;  but  judgment  was  arrested  upon 
appeal,  because  of  a  technical  omission  in 
Bryant's  declaration,  although  Chief-Justice 
Parsons  virtually  admitted  the  justice  of  the 
claim.  There  is  a  further  tradition,  that  a 
difference  with  one  of  the  opposing  counsel, 
about  the  cost  of  the  suit,  was  one  of  the  oc 
casions  in  which  the  restrained  fire  of  the 
poet's  temperament  blazed  fiercely  forth.  It 
was  easy  for  a  man  whose  wishes  sought  an 
excuse  for  leaving  the  law,  to  find  it  in  what 
seemed  to  him  a  denial  of  acknowledged  jus 
tice  by  the  highest  legal  tribunal.  To  his 
indignant  mind,  the  law  probably  seemed, 
despite  Coke's  famous  words,  the  perfection 
of  unreason,  and  the  poet,  bent  upon  closing 
his  office,  and  loving  his  Wordsworth  more 
than  his  Blackstone,  may  well  have  felt  that 
if  the  seat  of  law  be  the  bosom  of  God,  it  had 
returned  whence  it  came.  Bryant  had  tried 
his  last  case.  He  left  Berkshire,  but  while 
its  Monument  Mountain  stands  and  its  Green 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  33 

River  flows,  Berkshire  will  claim  their  poet  as 
her  own.  One  of  the  last  of  the  Berkshire 
poems  was  the  June,  which  was  first  pub 
lished  in  the  year  after  he  left  Great  Barring- 
ton,  the  poet's  farewell  to 

"  The  glorious  sky, 
And  the  green  uplands  round  :  " 

the  farewell  whose  pensive  and  airy  music 
was  in  all  hearts  and  on  all  lips  when  he  died, 
as  he  had  fancifully  wished,  in  June. 

The  New  York  to  which  Bryant  came  to 
live  by  literature  was  a  city  of  a  hundred  and 
eighty  thousand  inhabitants,  the  pleasant  city 
of  which  Paulding  says,  in  his  New  Pilgrim's 
Progress,  that  the  dandy  under  no  temptation 
must  extend  his  walk  beyond  the  north-west 
corner  of  Chambers  Street.  The  solid  city 
reached  a  little  beyond  Canal  Street,  and  a 
line  of  houses  straggled  up  as  far  as  Fourth 
Street.  There  were  those  who  still  remem 
bered  the  pebbly  shore  of  the  Hudson  River 
just  above  Barclay  Street,  which  was  the 
favorite  walk  of  Jonathan  Edwards,  when  he 
was  preaching  for  a  time  in  the  church  in 


34  A  Commemorative  Address. 

Wall  Street,  and  Bryant  speaks  of  his  own 
delight  in  rambling  along  the  wooded  shores 
of  the  Hudson  above  Canal  Street.  The 
house  of  his  friend  Sedgwick,  whose  sister 
Catharine  was  already  famous,  was  the  resort 
of  the  Knickerbocker  wits  and  authors,  and 
of  all  literary  strangers.  To  this  modest  Hol 
land  House  came  Verplanck,  Halleck,  Hill- 
house,  Cooper,  Moore,  Chancellor  Kent, 
Dunlap,  Jarvis,  De  Kay,  Jacob  Harvey,  Du- 
rand,  Henry  James  Anderson,  and  from  this 
charmed  circle  Cooper  afterward  founded  a 
club,  which  met  weekly  in  Washington  Hall. 
The  year  of  Bryant's  arrival  in  New  York 
was  that  of  the  beginning  of  the  Sketch  Club 
and  the  founding  of  the  National  Academy  of 
Design.  To  this  Academy  he  was  always 
loyal,  and  he  writes  proudly  from  London,  in 
1845,  of  the  exhibition  of  the  Royal  Academy: 
"  I  see  nothing  in  it  to  astonish  one  who  has 
visited  the  exhibition  of  our  Academy  of  the 
Arts  of  Design  in  New  York." 

His  work  began  at  once,  but  the  "  New 
York  Review,"  which  he  edited,  and  other 
literary  enterprises,  soon  failed  ;  and  in  the 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  35 

year  1826,  when  he  was  thirty-two  years  old, 
he  became  associate  editor,  with  William 
Coleman,  of  the  "  Evening  Post."  It  was 
the  memorable  year  of  the  first  Jubilee  of 
our  Independence.  Peace  and  prosperity 
seemed  to  be  assured,  and  the  mighty  flood 
of  American  civilization,  with  a  people  grown 
in  fifty  years  from  three  millions  to  ten,  was 
sweeping  from  the  sea-coast  over  the  Alle- 
ghanies,  and  far  westward  beyond  the  Mis 
sissippi,  leaving  in  every  valley  and  on  every 
hill-top,  as  it  passed,  the  bold  enterprise,  the 
ready  invention,  the  nimble  skill,  the  cheerful 
and  heroic  endurance,  the  religious  sobriety, 
all  the  robust  qualities  that  found  and  per 
petuate  great  States.  Lafayette  haxd  just 
crossed  the  ocean  to  see  with  rejoicing  eyes 
the  glory  of  the  nation  whose  generous 
soldier  he  had  been.  De  Witt  Clinton  had 
just  led  in  triumph  the- waters  of  Lake  Erie 
to  the  sea;  and  in  the  year  in  which  Bryant 
began  his  editorial  life,  John  Adams  and  Jef 
ferson  had  died,  happy  in  the  undoubted  se 
curity  of  their  work,  and  Webster,  summoned 
to  speak  the  reverent  gratitude  of  a  nation, 


36  A  Commemorative  Address. 

had  delivered  the  oration  in  Faneuil  Hall, 
which  instantly  passed  into  the  class-book 
and  speakers,  and  was  declaimed  in  every 
schoolhouse  in  the  land.  The  country  had 
not  lost  its  original  character  of  a  rural  re 
public.  Political  feeling,  as  we  have  seen, 
was  intense,  but  the  vast  political  hierarchy 
which  has  sprung  from  patronage,  and  which 
now,  with  far-reaching  and  elaborate  organi 
zation,  constitutes  a  distinct  and  disciplined 
class  of  middle-men  for  the  control  of  poli 
tics,  was  practically  unknown,  and  the  move 
ments  of  parties,  therefore,  more  truly  repre 
sented  the  convictions  of  the  people.  John 
Quincy  Adams  was  President,  a  man  of  un 
sullied  character,  of  great  ability,  of  resolute 
independence,  superior  to  party  trick  or  per 
sonal  intrigue ;  a  civilian  of  will  as  indomitable 
as  that  of  his  military  successor — a  President 
—and  such  may  our  Presidents  always  be ! — 
who  believed  that  he  serves  his  party  best 
who  serves  his  country  most. 

This  was  the  fortunate  epoch  and  this  the 
happy  country  of  1826.  It  was  also  the  end 
and  the  beginning  of  party  organizations. 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  37 

Mr.  Adams  favored  what  was  called  a  mag 
nificent  national  policy,  a  system  of  interna 
tional  improvements,  of  superb  public  works, 
a  continental  alliance  with  South  America,  a 
protective  tariff.  Bryant  was  more  interested 
in  the  freedom  of  trade  than  in  any  other  pend 
ing  public  question,  and  the  general  argument 
for  freedom  of  trade  was  an  argument  for  the 
limited  function  of  the  national  government. 
Bryant's  subsequent  editorial  associate,  Mr. 
Bigelow,  tells  us  that  upon  undertaking  the 
joint  editorship  of  the  Post,  a  paper  which 
had  been  founded  under  the  auspices  of 
Hamilton,  the  father  of  protection  and  of  the 
United  States  Bank,  the  only  condition  that 
the  young  poet  from  the  hills  made  was  an 
unfettered  freedom  to  advocate  the  emanci 
pation  of  commerce  from  severe  restrictions, 
and  the  separation  of  the  money  of  the 
Government  from  the  banking  capital  of  the 
country. 

It  was  at  this  time,  in  the  years  1823  and 
the  two  following  years,  that  England,  under 
Huskisson,  abandoned  the  old  system  of  pro 
tection  and  made  the  changes  in  commercial 


38  A  Commemorative  Address. 

legislation  which  are  regarded  as  the  first 
practical  application  of  the  principles  of  free 
trade.  The  contest  in  this  country  began  at 
once  upon  the  revision  of  the  tariff  of  1824, 
and  the  passage  of  that  of  1828,  from  which 
sprang  nullification.  It  was  a  great  debate,  in 
which  sectional  feeling  was  fiercely  inflamed, 
and  in  which  also  Webster  and  Calhoun 
changed  ground.  It  was  the  first  important 
public  discussion  in  which  Bryant  engaged, 
and  he  was  soon  involved  in  it  with  all  the 
fire  of  conviction  and  all  the  energy  of  his 
nature.  The  Post  was  the  sole  advocate,  in 
the  Free  States,  of  the  policy  and  the  justice 
of  the  principles  of  Free  Trade.  With  reso 
lute  pertinacity,  through  good  and  evil  re 
port,  Bryant  maintained  that  the  condition  of 
higher  civilization,  the  surest  pledge  of  inter 
national  peace  and  justice,  and  the  security  of 
American  prosperity  was  freedom  of  commer 
cial  exchange.  He  fought  this  battle  for  more 
than  fifty  years  ;  the  last  article  that  he  wrote 
for  his  paper  was  a  discussion  of  the  balance 
of  trade,  and  he  died  in  the  faith,  acknowl 
edged  as  one  of  its  most  powerful  champions. 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  39 

Meanwhile  General  Jackson  had  declared  for 
a  ''judicious"  tariff.  The  Post  supported  him 
for  the  Presidency;  and  in  1829,  the  year  of 
Jackson's  inauguration,  Mr.  Coleman  died, 
and  Bryant  became  chief  editor.  But  his 
devotion  to  freedom  of  exchange  was  like 
that  which  he  cherished  for  all  other  freedom. 
It  was  American  liberty,  not  what  the  English 
laureate,  speaking  of  revolutionary  France, 
calls  "The  blind  hysterics  of  the  Celt."  It 
was  the  freedom  of  the  citizen  in  the  State, 
and  the  freedom  of  the  State  in  the  Union. 
It  was  liberty  under  law,  that  he  sought,  for 
he  knew  that  lawless  revolution  is  a  remedy 
more  appalling  than  the  evils  it  would  cure. 
He  had  pointed  out,  in  principle  and  in  de 
tail,  the  injustice  of  the  tariff  toward  the 
Southern  States,  but  when  nullification  was 
proposed  as  a  remedy,  his  voice  was  prompt, 
clear  and  decisive  in  sustaining  General  Jack 
son's  proclamation — true  to  national  union  in 
1832  as  he  was  in  1861. 

But  from  the  day  that  Bryant  began  to 
edit  the  Post,  there  was  but  one  question 
which  was  really  supreme,  the  question  which 


4O  A  Commemorative  Address. 

hung  like  a  huge  storm-cloud  in  the  summer 
sky,  its  lightning  sheathed,  its  thunder  silent, 
but  gathering  with  every  moment  angrier 
force  and  more  appalling  fury — the  question 
with  whose  final  and  tremendous  settlement 
the  land  still  heaves.  It  had  apparently  dis 
appeared  in  the  deceitful  calm  that  followed 
the  Missouri  struggle,  but  the  first  penetra 
ting  and  significant  note  of  a  tempest  not  to 
be  stayed  was  heard  within  four  years  of  Bry 
ant's  removal  to  New  York,  in  the  moral 
anti- slavery  appeal  of  Lundy  and  Garrison. 
Bryant  seemed  to  the  ardent  leaders  of  that 
great  agitation  as  the  multitude  of  editors  and 
politicians  seemed  to  them,  indifferent  and 
hesitating,  too  cold  and  reluctant  for  their 
own  generous  wrath  and  zeal.  In  his  letters 
from  the  Southern  States  and  the  West  In 
dies,  as  late  as  1849,  there  is  a  photographic 
fidelity  of  detail  in  descriptions  of  slavery 
and  of  the  slaves,  but  they  are  the  pictures  of 
a  seemingly  passionless  observer.  There  is 
no  apparent  sense  of  wrong,  no  flaming  in 
dignation,  no  denunciation ;  an  occasional  im 
pulsive  expression  only  shows  his  feelings. 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  41 

This  restraint  and  moderation,  however,  al 
ways  so  characteristic,  are  most  impressive, 
and  give  to  his  prose,  whether  in  letters  or 
addresses  or  editorial  articles,  however  strong 
the  public  feeling  or  hot  the  debate,  the 
weight  and  value  which  so  often  exhale  in 
greater  fervor  of  expression.  But  the  breath 
of  the  tropics  did  not  relax  his  moral  fibre. 
The  loiterer  at  the  Negro  corn-shucking 
in  Carolina  and  in  the  orange  groves  of 
Florida,  the  tranquil  stranger  in  the  Cuban 
coffee  estates  and  the  sugar  plantations  of 
Matanzas,  who  observed  everything  and 
quietly  asked  a  traveler's  questions,  was 
not  untrue  to  the  spirit  that  he  had  inhaled 
with  his  native  breath  among  the  northern 
hills. 

Through  all  the  great  Slavery  contest  from 
1820  to  1 86 1,  which  included  the  prime  of  his 
manhood,  Bryant's  course  was  determined  by 
his  own  love  of  liberty  and  justice,  by  his 
temperament  and  conscience.  He  repelled 
the  reproaches  of  friends  equally  with  the 
gibes  of  enemies.  When  the  moral  appeal 
swelled  to  an  agitation  under  which  the  coun- 


42  A  Commemorative  Address. 

try  rocked;  when  there  were  even  voices 
heard  in  Faneuil  Hall  justifying  the  assassi 
nation  of  Lovejoy,  and  American  freemen 
speaking  for  liberty  in  New  York  were  si 
lenced  by  mobs,  and  with  no  consuming  wrath 
of  protest  from  the  respectable  public  opinion 
of  the  city — although  Bryant,  as  I  think,  dep 
recated  the  agitation  as  mistaken  in  its  meth 
od,  and  necessarily  futile  and  disastrous  in  its 
result,  he  resolutely  defended  the  fundamental 
right  of  discussion,  which  was  the  practical 
and  essential  anti-slavery  demand. 

Early  in  1837,  when  the  House  of  Repre 
sentatives  tried  to  stifle  the  anti-slavery  peti 
tions  presented  by  John  Quincy  Adams — and 
they  might  as  well  have  tried  to  blow  out 
the  sun — Bryant  denounced  the  folly  and  the 
wrong  of  attempting  to  "  muzzle  discussion  in 
this  country,"  and  in  the  same  year,  when  the 
colored  voters  of  New  York  asked  the  legis 
lature  to  grant  them  suffrage  upon  the  same 
conditions  with  the  white  voters — Bryant  sus 
tained  their  prayer  as  just,  and  disdained  any 
deference  to  external  dictation  whether  from 
the  South,  from  the  North,  or  from  any  other 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  43 

quarter.  With  the  same  clear  perception 
and  inflexible  principle  he  held  that  Con 
gress  had  perfect  power  over  the  question  of 
slavery  in  the  District  of  Columbia ;  and  he 
sternly  condemned  all  interference  with  the 
right  of  any  body  of  citizens  anywhere  in  the 
country  to  declare  their  views  upon  the  sub 
ject  by  petition  to  their  representatives.  To 
day,  in  the  full  sunlight  of  constitutional  per 
sonal  liberty,  these  angry  debates  seem  like 
the  strange  spectres  of  a  cloudy  night.  Their 
echoes  are  remote  and  unreal,  like  those  of 
Attila's  battle  in  the  air.  But  in  telling  the 
story  of  the  life  of  a  reverend  citizen  who  saw 
the  beginning  and  the  end  of  that  tremendous 
contest,  the  struggle  in  which  the  institutions 
and  the  principles  that  we  all  love  and  trust 
were  tried  by  blood  and  fire,  emerging  at  last 
to  victory,  but  emerging  only  through 

<{ exultations,  agonies, 


And  love,  and  man's  unconquerable  mind," 

victory  not  for  one  side,  but  for  all  men ;  not 
for  provincial  sections,  but  for  national  union ; 
not  for  the  North  nor  for  the  South,  but  for 


44  A  Commemorative  Address. 

America  and  universal  liberty ;  in  telling  the 
story  of  such  a  life,  the  men  and  the  contests 
of  old  days  spring  again  to  light,  we  see  how 
continuous  is  the  stream  of  history,  and  we 
learn  once  more  that  the  welfare  of  liberty 
and  civilization  is  intrusted  to  precisely  those 
qualities  which  Bryant  displayed  in  his  edito 
rial  career. 

His  temperament  was  conservative  in  the 
truest  sense,  but  his  political  convictions  and 
sympathies  were  in  the  same  sense  liberal 
and  Democratic.  The  old  Federal  distrust 
of  the  people,  which  in  later  days  and  under 
other  conditions  has  seemed  to  so  many  hon 
est  and  patriotic  men  to  be  justified  as  only  a 
proper  fear  of  ignorance  and  corruption,  yet 
a  distrust  which,  however  logical  it  may  seem 
in  argument  and  detail,  is  refuted  by  the  mar 
velous  and  beneficent  American  history  of  a 
century,  was  a  doubt  which  Bryant  never 
shared.  As  Sir  Philip  Sidney  warned  the 
young  poet  to  look  in  his  own  heart  and 
write,  so  his  good  genius  taught  Bryant  to 
look  into  his  own  heart  and  believe.  He 
knew  himself,  and  he  therefore  trusted  others. 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  45 

He  had  seen  among  the  hills  the  virtues,  the 
habits,  the  character,  that  make  popular  gov 
ernment  simple  and  practicable,  and  he  did 
not  doubt  that  under  the  unparalleled  circum 
stances  of  the  country,  however  political  con 
ditions  might  be  complicated  by  the  large 
infusion  of  other  blood  and  other  traditions, 
the  great  appeal  which  our  institutions  make 
to  the  conscious  dignity  and  self-respect  of 
human  nature  would  be  answered  in  ways  we 
might  not  be  able  to  foresee,  but  which  expe 
rience  and  self-knowledge  admonish  us  will 
be  effective. 

But,  from  the  first  to  the  last,  his  Democracy 
never  meant  a  rabble  nor  a  mob,  but  a  consti 
tutionally  self-restrained  people.  Bryant,  in 
deed,  was  a  warm  party  man.  It  was  a  fiery 
nature  which  always  lay  beneath  the  placid 
and  coldly  reserved  manner,  and  which  at 
times  flashed  suddenly  into  vehement  expres 
sion.  The  verse  of  no  poet  is  more  abso 
lutely  sincere,  and  the  lines  in  the  tender 
poem  to  his  wife,  on  the  future  life,  written  in 
1837,  which  have  often  seemed  singularly 
extravagant  for  a  man  so  apparently  passion- 


46  A  Commemorative  Address. 

less,  were  unquestionably  the  fervid  expres 
sion  of  self-knowledge : 

"  And  wrath  has  left  its  scar — that  fire  of  hell 
Has  left  its  frightful  scar  upon  my  soul." 

With  what  force  he  restrained  himself  we 
shall  not  know.  We  only  know  with  what 
success.  But  his  habitual  moderation  and 
calmness  were  not  the  gift  of  an  easy,  lym 
phatic  temperament ;  they  were  the  grace  of 
a  great  and  manly  self-command.  In  the  vast 
political  strife  of  the  half-century,  he  was  a 
foremost  combatant.  But  his  politics  had  no 
personal  aims.  During  his  life  he  held  but 
two  public  offices — those  of  town-clerk  and 
justice  of  the  peace  in  Great  Barrington.  He 
was  a  presidential  elector  in  1860,  a  mere 
honorary  position,  and  he  declined  even  an 
election  as  Regent  of  the  University,  from  his 
invincible  dislike  of  any  kind  of  public  life. 
There  is,  indeed,  no  nobler  ambition  than  to 
fill  a  great  office  greatly,  but  it  was  not  in 
Bryant's  heart.  The  splendid  prizes  of  offi 
cial  place  never  allured  him,  and  his  lofty  aims 
shone  as  pure  in  his  perfect  independence  as 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  47 

the  virginal  beauty  of  Sabrina  in  the  "glassy, 
cool,  translucent  wave." 

In  all  the  long,  tumultuous  years  of  his  edi 
torial  life  does  any  memory,  however  search 
ing  or  censorious,  recall  one  line  that  he 
wrote  which  was  not  honest  and  pure,  one 
measure  that  he  defended  except  from  the 
profoundest  conviction  of  its  usefulness  to  the 
country,  one  cause  that  he  advocated  which 
any  friend  of  liberty,  of  humanity,  of  good 
government  would  deplore?  When  in  the 
British  Parliament,  after  a  hard  and  weary 
and  doubtful  struggle  of  twenty  years,  the  bill 
of  William  Wilberforce  for  abolishing  the 
British  slave  trade  was  finally  passed,  the  his 
torian  says  that  Sir  Samuel  Romilly  surprised 
the  staid  House  of  Commons  into  loud  and 
long  acclamations  by  comparing  the  greatness 
and  happiness  of  Napoleon  Bonaparte,  then 
in  the  zenith  of  his  imperial  glory,  with  those 
of  him  who  would  this  "  day  lay  his  head 
upon  his  pillow  and  remember  that  the  slave 
trade  was  no  more."  So  it  is  the  lesson  of 
this  editorial  life,  that  public  service,  the  most 
resplendent  and  the  most  justly  renowned,  on 


48  A  Commemorative  Address. 

sea  or  shore,  in  cabinet  or  Congress,  how 
ever  great,  however  beneficent,  is  not  a  truer 
service  than  that  of  the  private  citizen  like 
Bryant,  who  for  half  a  century,  with  con 
science  and  knowledge,  with  power  and  un- 
quailing  courage,  did  his  part  in  holding  the 
hand  and  heart  of  his  country  true  to  her 
now  glorious  ideal. 

During  all  this  time,  the  sturdy  political 
editor  was  the  chief  literary  figure  in  the  city. 
Mr.  Bigelow  says,  that  he  never  mingled  or 
confounded  his  two  vocations,  that  they  were 
two  distinct  currents  of  intellectual  life.  This 
is  doubtless  true.  But  it  is  the  same  breath 
of  the  organ  that  thunders  through  the  trum 
pet  stop  and  whispers  in  the  vox  humana. 
In  the  earlier  legends,  it  is  the  poet  who  leads 
the  warriors,  and  the  earlier  legends  were 
justified  when  the  poet  of  Thanatopsis  and 
"The  Water-fowl"  came  down  from  the  hills 
to  the  newspaper  office.  In  1832,  he  was,  as 
he  says,  "wandering  in  Illinois  hovering  on 
the  skirts  of  the  Indian  war,"  when  Washing 
ton  Irving  returned  from  his  long  European 
absence.  In  the  same  year  a  complete  edi- 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  49 

tion  of  his  poems  was  published  in  New  York, 
and  he  went  to  Europe  in  1834  for  the  first 
time,  returning  in  1836.  In  1841,  and  the 
following  year,  he  travelled  in  the  West  and 
South  of  the  United  States.  In  1842,  "  The 
Fountain "  and  other  poems  of  seventeen 
years  were  published,  and  in  1844  "  The 
White-footed  Deer."  He  went  again  to 
Europe  in  1845,  seeing  England  for  the  first 
time.  The  next  year  a  fully  illustrated  collec 
tion  of  his  poems  was  issued,  and  in  1848  he 
read  a  discourse  upon  Cole  before  the 
National  Academy  of  Design.  In  the  sum 
mer  of  1849  he  went  for  the  third  time  to 
Europe,  and  upon  his  return,  in  1850,  he  pub 
lished  his  (<  Letters  of  a  Traveller."  Early  in 
1852,  he  delivered  a  discourse  on  Cooper. 
In  the  spring  he  was  in  Cuba,  and  during  the 
summer  again  in  Europe.  But  amid  all  ac 
cumulating  interests  and  duties  and  renown, 
his  unwearied  editorial  industry  continued; 
an  industry  of  which  his  associate  says,  that 
for  five  days  out  of  every  week,  during  forty- 
two  years  of  the  fifty-two  that  he  was  the 
chief  editor,  he  was  at  his  desk  before  eight 
3 


50  A  Commemorative  Address. 

o'clock  in  the  morning,  and  left  upon  his 
journal  in  some  form  the  daily  impression  of 
his  character  and  genius. 

During  all  this  time,  also,  the  literature 
that  he  had  heralded  he  had  seen  arising 
around  him ;  and  he  greeted  with  cordial  ap 
preciation  poets,  historians,  story-tellers,  es 
sayists,  whose  names  we  love  and  who  have 
made  our  name  honorable.  Yet,  as  his  own 
poems  were  published  from  time  to  time,  it 
was  plain  that  through  all  the  imposing 
changes  of  form  in  English  literature  his 
simple  and  severe  genius  remained  un 
changed.  Although  he  was  a  singularly 
accomplished  student  of  the  literature  of 
many  languages,  and  while  his  translations 
from  other  tongues  are  so  felicitous  that  his 
fellow  master,  Longfellow,  praised  some  of 
his  Spanish  translations,  nearly  fifty  years 
ago,  a$  rivalling  the  original  in  beauty,  yet 
his  own  verse  is  as  free  from  merely  literary 
influence  or  reminiscence  as  the  pure  air  of 
his  native  hills  from  the  perfume  of  exotics. 

Undoubtedly  the  grandeur  and  solemnity 
o.f  Wordsworth,  as  he  told  Dana,  had  stirred 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  51 

his  soul  with  sympathy.  But  not  the  false 
simplicity  that  sometimes  betrays  Words 
worth,  nor  the  lurid  melodrama  of  Byron,  nor 
the  a'erial  fervor  of  Shelley,  nor  the  luxuriant 
beauty  of  Keats,  in  whose  line  the  Greek  mar 
ble  is  sometimes  suffused  with  a  splendor  as 
of  Venetian  color,  nor,  in  his  later  years,  the 
felicity  and  richness  of  Tennyson,  who  has 
revealed  the  flexibility  and  picturesqueness 
and  modulated  music  of  the  English  language 
in  lines  which  a  line  of  Keats  describes : 

"  Like  lucent  sirops  tinct  with  cinnamon," 

— not  all  these  varying  and  entrancing  strains 
which  captivated  the  public  of  the  hour, 
touched  in  the  least  the  verse  of  Bryant. 
His  last  considerable  poem,  "The  Flood  of 
Years,"  but  echoes  in  its  meditative  flow  the 
solemn  cadences  of  Thanatopsis.  The  child 
was  father  of  the  man.  The  genius  of  Bry 
ant,  not  profuse  and  imperial,  neither  intense 
with  dramatic  passion  nor  throbbing  with  lyri 
cal  fervor,  but  calm,  meditative,  pure,  has  its 
true  symbol  among  his  native  hills,  a  moun 
tain-spring  untainted  by  mineral  pr  slime  of 


52  A  Commemorative  Address. 

earth  or  reptile  venom,  cool,  limpid  and  se 
rene.  His  verse  is  the  virile  expression  of 
the  healthy  communion  of  a  strong,  sound 
man  with  the  familiar  aspects  of  nature,  and 
its  broad,  clear,  open-air  quality  has  a  certain 
Homeric  suggestiveness.  It  is  not  the  poet 
ry  of  an  eager  enthusiasm ;  it  is  not  fascinat 
ing  and  overpowering  to  the  sensibility  of 
youth.  The  first  considerable  collection  of 
1832  was  not  snatched  from  the  booksellers' 
hands,  and  four  years  had  passed  before  it 
had  reached  a  fourth  edition.  Bryant  found 
ed  no  school  and  he  belonged  to  none,  except 
it  be  to  the  class  of  those  who  are  vaguely 
called  poets  of  nature.  His  spirit  is  doubt 
less  more  akin  to  that  of  Wordsworth  than  to 
any  other  of  the  "  bards  sublime,"  although 
he  had  not  Wordsworth's  fertility  and  variety 
and  richness  of  imagination,  and  resembled 
him  only  in  the  meditative  character  of  his 
genius.  It  is  this  essentially  meditative  char 
acter  which  makes  the  atmosphere  of  his  poet 
ic  world  more  striking  than  its  forms;  and 
thus  his  contribution  of  memorable  lines  to 
our  literature  is  not  great,  although  there  are 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  53 

some  lines  of  an  unsurpassed  majesty,  and 
again  touches  of  fancy  and  imagination  as 
airy  and  delicate  as  the  dance  of  fairies  upon 
a  moonlit  lawn.  One  stanza,  indeed,  perhaps 
the  most  familiar  in  all  his  verse,  will  be  long 
the  climax  of  patriotic  appeal ;  and  for  a  thou 
sand  years  in  the  country  that  he  loved,  while 
the  absorbing  contentions  of  politics  shall 
continue,  and  there  shall  be  an  ever  higher 
political  aspiration  and  a  nobler  political  en 
deavor,  Bryant's  lines  will  be  the  gathering 
cry  and  battle  song  of  brave  soldiers  of  hu 
manity  yet  unborn : 

"  Truth  crushed  to  earth  shall  rise  again  ; 

The  eternal  years  of  God  are  hers  : 
But  Error,  wounded,  writhes  with  pain 
And  dies  among  her  worshippers." 

Meanwhile,  true  to  his  principles,  his  party 
associations  were  again  changing,  and  the 
close  of  the  administration  of  Mr.  Pierce 
found  Bryant  in  the  opposition.  He  saw  in 
the  situation  of  the  country  but  one  supreme 
issue.  He  saw  the  system  of  slavery  en 
trenched  in  vast  interests,  traditions,  and 
prejudices,  in  the  spirit  of  party,  in  the 


54  A  Commemorative  Address. 

timidity  of  trade,  in  constitutional  interpreta 
tion,  in  the  idolatry  of  the  Union,  and  in  a 
vague  and.  universal  apprehension  of  the  il 
limitable  evil  of  resistance.  He  saw  its  vast 
power.  He  acknowledged  every  lawful  de 
fense,  every  plea  of  expediency,  every  appeal 
of  possible  calamity.  He  had  deprecated 
agitation  which  seemed  to  him  only  to  exas 
perate  feeling  and  rivet  bonds  more  closely. 
But  now  he  saw — not  as  a  Democrat,  not  as 
a  New  Yorker,  not  as  a  Northerner — he  saw 
as  a  man,  that  humanity  was  in  danger, 
where  he  could  help ;  he  saw  as  an  American, 
that  America  was  imperilled  ;  he  saw  as  a 
life-long  lover  of  liberty,  that  liberty  was 
vitally  assailed  ;  and  as  a  man,  as  an  Ameri 
can,  as  a  lover  of  liberty,  he  declared,  in  the 
spring  of  1856,  against  the  extension  of 
slavery,  and  five  years  later  his  whole  political 
faith  burst  forth  in  one  indignant  peal  of 
patriotism : 

"  Our  country  calls — away,  away  ! 

To  where  the  blood-stream  blots  the  green  ; 
Strike  to  defend  the  gentlest  sway 
That  time  in  all  his  course  has  seen. 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  55 

Strike  for  that  broad  and  goodly  land, 

Blow  after  blow,  till  men  shall  see 
That  might  and  right  move  hand  in  hand, 

And  glorious  must  their  triumph  be." 

But  he  renounced  none  of  his  political 
principles,  and  when  the  tendency  to  a  more 
consolidated  and  powerful  central  authority 
was  naturally  developed  by  the  war,  accord 
ing"  to  the  faith  of  his  life,  he  counseled  the 
statesmanship  of  the  Sun,  not  of  the  Wind, 
and  held  that  loyalty  alienated  from  the 
Union  could  be  most  surely  restored  and 
equal  rights  most  firmly  secured  only  by 
large  dependence  upon  local  law  and  local 
feeling,  by  long  patience  and  slow  processes 
of  healing.  It  was  the  same  man,  the  same 
patriot,  the  same  American,  asserting  the 
same  principles,  who,  in  1832,  praised  Jack 
son's  proclamation  against  nullification,  and, 
in  1837,  spurned  all  external  interference  re 
specting  the  qualification  of  voters  in  New 
York;  who,  in  1863,  sustained  the  Emanci 
pation  Proclamation,  and,  in  1875,  denounced 
the  interference  of  the  national  military  powrer 
with  the  Legislature  of  Louisiana.  But  as 


56  A  Commemorative  Address. 

he  passed  through  parties,  so  he  passed  out 
of  them.  With  increasing  years  his  party 
zeal  diminished,  and  under  the  liberalizing 
and  mellowing  influence  of  time  he  gradually 
became,  as  was  said  of  Sir  Robert  Peel, 
"  himself  a  party."  He  had  been  a  Federal 
ist,  a  Democrat,  and  a  Republican  ;  but  all 
were  only  names  of  the  various  uniforms  in 
which  he  served  the  same  cause,  the  cause  of 
his  youth  and  of  his  age,  the  cause  of  America 
and  of  human  nature. 

Bryant  made  his  fifth  voyage  to  Europe  in 
1857,  travelling  in  Spain  and  Algiers,  and  he 
published  a  volume  of  Letters  from  Spain 
upon  his  return.  He  went  again  in  1865  and 
1867,  seven  times  in  all.  It  was  during  his 
absence,  in  1858,  that  he  was  baptized  in 
Naples.  He  had  been  religiously  bred  in 
New  England  Congregationalism,  but  when 
he  came  to  New  York  he  went  to  the  little 
Unitarian  church  in  Chambers  Street,  near 
Broadway;  of  which  William  Ware,  the  mild 
and  apostolic  author  of  the  Letters  from  Pal 
myra,  was  pastor.  He  went  afterwards  to  the 
Second  Church,  of  which  Dr.  Dewey  and  Dr. 


William  Ciillen  Bryant.  57 

Osgood  were  subsequently  ministers,  and  he 
stayed  in  that  parish  until  1863,  when  he  found 
the  church  of  his  old  parish,  now  All  Souls' 
Church,  of  which  the  Reverend  Dr.  Bellows 
was  pastor,  more  accessible.  In  that  parish 
he  remained,  and  from  that  church  he  was 
buried.  But  while  his  religious,  like  his  politi 
cal  convictions,  were  positive,  sectarian,  like 
political  bonds,  did  not  hold  him  closely.  The 
spirit  of  liberty,  which  was  the  native  air  of 
his  soul,  fostered  the  celestial  graces  of  faith, 
hope,  charity,  and  he  was,  as  his  poetry  and 
his  life  testify,  essentially  a  religious  man. 
The  poem  called  "  The  Life  that  is,"  dated 
at  Castellamare,  in  May,  1858,  commemorates 
the  recovery  of  his  wife  from  a  serious  illness. 
A  little  time  before,  in  the  month  of  April, 
after  a  long  walk  with  his  friend,  the  Rever 
end  Mr.  Waterston,  of  Boston,  on  the  shore 
of  the  Bay  of  Naples,  he  spoke  with  softened 
heart  of  the  new  beauty  that  he  felt  in  the  old 
truth,  and  proposed  to  his  friend  to  baptize 
him.  With  prayer  and  hymn  and  -spiritual 
meditation,  a  little  company  of  seven,  says 
Mr.  Waterston,  in  a  large  upper  room,  as  in 


58  A  Commemorative  Address. 

the  Christian  story,  partook  of  the  commu 
nion,  and,  with  his  good  gray  head  bowed 
down,  Bryant  was  baptized. 

During  all  these  busy  years  he  had  become 
a  man  of  threescore  and  ten.  The  pleasant 
city  that  he  knew  when  he  came  to  New 
York  was  now  the  chief  city  of  the  Western 
Continent,  one  of  the  great  cities  of  the 
world;  and  the  poet  whose  immortal  distinc 
tion  it  was  to  have  written  the  first  memorable 
American  poem,  and  whose  fame  was  part  of 
the  national  glory — the  editor  who,  with  per 
fect  unselfishness  and  unswerving  fidelity,  had 
expounded  and  defended  great  fundamental 
principles  of  national  progress  and  prosperity, 
became  our  Patriarch,  our  Mentor,  our  most 
conspicuous  citizen.  Every  movement  of  art 
and  literature,  of  benevolence  and  good  citi 
zenship,  sought  the  decoration  of  his  name. 
His  presence  was  the  grace  of  every  festival, 
and  although  he  had  always  instinctively 
shrunk  from  personal  publicity,  he  yielded  to 
a  fate,  benignant  for  the  community,  and  to 
his  other  distinctions  added  that  of  the  occa 
sional  orator.  Yet  all  such  associations  were 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  59 

not  only  gilded  with  the  luster  of  his  renown  ; 
they  had  not  only  the  advantage  of  his  ample 
knowledge  and  various  observations,  but  there 
was  the  stimulus  of  his  temperament  and 
character.  His  companions  in  society  and  at 
the  club  know  that  his  great  literary  accom 
plishment  was  absolutely  without  pedantry, 
while  it  gave  his  conversation  and  writing  the 
charm  of  apt  allusion  and  most  felicitous 
quotation  ;  but  they  know  also  how  much 
greater  was  the  man  than  the  scholar,  and 
that  his  character  was  as  fine  as  his  genius. 

We  saw  in  his  life  the  simple  dignity  which 
we  associate  with  the  old  republics.  So  Ly- 
curgus  may  have  ruled  in  Sparta,  so  Cato 
may  have  walked  in  Rome — an  uncrowned 
regality  in  that  venerable  head,  as  of  one 
nurtured  in  Republican  air,  upon  Republican 
traditions.  But  here  and  now,  at  this  season, 
when  our  hearts  recur  to  that  Pilgrim  Land 
ing  from  which  so  much  of  America  sprang, 
we  may  gratefully  remember  that  this  son  of 
New  England  was  always,  in  the  most  gen 
erous  and  representative  sense,  an  American. 
He  loitered  with  the  sympathy  of  a  poet, 


60  A  Commemorative  Address. 

with  the  fondness  of  a  scholar,  with  the  in 
terest  of  a  political  thinker,  in  other  and 
historic  lands.  He  saw  the  Rhine  and  the 
Danube,  Italy,  Germany,  England  and  Spain, 
Palestine  and  the  West  Indies.  He  was  wel 
comed  and  flattered  by  famous  men  and  beau 
tiful  women  ;  but  grave  and  simple,  pleased 
but  untouched,  he  passed  through  the  maze 
of  blandishment  as  a  cool  north  wind  blows 
through  a  garden  of  spices.  Whoever  saw 
Bryant  saw  America.  Whoever  talked  with 
him  felt  the  characteristic  tone  of  American 
life.  Whoever  knew  him  comprehended  the 
reason  and  perceived  the  quality  of  American 
greatness.  Many  Americans  have  been  as 
warmly  welcomed  in  other  lands,  many  have 
acknowledged  a  generous  hospitality  with  as 
gracious  courtesy,  but  no  one  ever  more  fully 
and  truly  carried  with  him  the  perfectly  ap 
preciative  but  undazzled  America ;  America 
tranquil,  content  and  expectant,  the  untitled 
cousin  of  the  older  world,  born  to  as  great  a 
heritage  and  satisfied  with  her  own.  You 
will  bear  me  witness,  for  you  knew  him,  that 
in  the  same  way  here  at  home  he  American- 


William  Cullen  Bryant.  61 

ized  every  occasion,  every  enterprise  in  which 
he  took  part.  I  have  seen  him  at  some  offer 
ing  of  homage  to  a  foreign  guest,  skillfully 
withstanding  the  current  of  excessive  compli 
ment,  natural  at  such  times,  yet  without 
morose  dissent,  and  only  by  a  shrewd  and 
playful  humor,  and  with  most  friendly  regard 
for  the  rites  of  hospitality,  gently  reminding 
us  that  manly  and  self-respecting  courtesy 
never  bows  too  low. 

From  his  childhood  and  through  all  his 
eighty-four  years  his  habits  of  life  were  tem 
perate  and  careful.  The  spring  in  a  sheltered 
upland  nook  at  Cummington  is  still  shown,  in 
which  the  infant  boy  was  bathed,  and  the  care 
which  was  there  prefigured  was  the  amulet 
that  charmed  his  life.  A  plain,  sweet  method 
of  living  was  natural  to  him,  and  the  same 
moderation,  which  was  the  law  of  his  mental 
and  moral  being,  asserted  itself  in  every 
bodily  habit.  He  rose  early,  took  active  exer 
cise,  walked  far  and  easily,  spared  work  at 
night,  yet  had  time  for  every  duty  of  a  fully 
occupied  life,  and  at  seventy-one  sat  down  in 
the  shadow  of  the  great  sorrow  of  his  life  to 


62  A  Commemorative  Address. 

seek  a  wise  distraction  in  translating  the 
Iliad  and  the  Odyssey.  His  sobriety  was 
effortless  ;  it  was  that  of  a  sound  man,  not  of 
an  ascetic.  He  was  not  a  vegetarian  nor  a 
total  abstainer  from  wine ;  but  of  tobacco,  he 
said,  playfully,  that  he  did  not  meddle  with  it 
except  to  quarrel  with  its  use.  No  man  ever 
bore  the  burden  of  years  more  lightly,  and 
men  of  younger  generations  saw  with  admira 
tion  and  amazement  an  agility  that  shamed 
their  own.  At  fourscore  his  eyes  were  un- 
dimmed,  and  his  ears  had  a  boy's  acuteness. 
Temperance,  regularity,  supreme  good  sense 
were  his  only  rules  of  living,  and  these 
brought  him  to  that  hale  and  gracious  age  in 
which  he  could  have  applied  to  himself  most 
fittingly  the  lofty  lines  of  Emerson : 

"  As  the  bird  trims  her  to  the  gale, 
I  trim  myself  to  the  storm  of  time, 
I  man  the  rudder,  reef  the  sail, 
Obey  the  voice  at  eve,  obeyed  at  prime : 

'  Lowly  faithful,  banish  fear, 
Right  onward  drive  unharmed, 
The  port  well  worth  the  cruise  is  near, 
And  every  wave  is  charmed  I'" 


William  Ciillen  Bryant.  63 

It  is  more  than  time  that  my  voice  were 
stilled,  but  I  linger  and  linger,  for  when  these 
words  are  spoken,  the  last  formal  commemo 
ration  of  our  poet  will  have  ended,  and  we 
shall  leave  him  to  history  and  good  fame. 
The  whole  earth,  said  Pericles,  is  the  tomb  of 
illustrious  men.  But  how  especially  the  char 
acteristic  aspects  of  American  nature  become 
to  the  imagination  and  memory  memorials  of 
Bryant.  The  primeval  woods,  "  God's  first 
temples,"  breathe  the  solemn  benediction  of 
his  verse.  The  rosy  splendor  of  orchards  in 
the  bright  June  sunshine  recall  the  singer  of 
the  planting  of  the  apple  tree — the  kindly 
eye,  the  manly  heart, 

"  Whose  part  in  all  the  pomp  that  fills 

The  circuit  of  the  summer  hills, 
Is  that  his  grave  is  green." 

The  water-fowl  at  evening  high  in  the  depths 
of  heaven,  "lone  wandering,  but  not  lost," 
figures  his  lofty,  pure,  and  solitary  strain  : 

"And  poured  round  all 
Old  ocean's  gray  and  melancholy  waste," 


64  A  Commemorative  Address. 

murmurs  his  name  forever  along  the  shores 
we  love. 

Here,  then,  we  leave  him,  with  tender 
reverence  for  the  father  of  our  song,  with 
grateful  homage  to  the  spotless  and  faithful 
citizen,  with  affectionate  admiration  for  the 
simple  and  upright  man.  Here  we  leave  him, 
and  we — we  go  forward  refreshed,  strength 
ened,  inspired,  by  the  light  of  the  life  which, 

like  a  star  serene  and  inextinguishable, 

i 

"  Flames  in  the  forehead  of  our  morning  sky." 


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DUE  AS  STAMPED  BELOW 


WR9    1990 


Jurtis,   G.W. 
Life,   character  and 


Call  Number: 


PS1181 

C8 


269407 


